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Ratko Mladic taunted Srebrenica survivors on Wednesday at the start of his trial, running his hand across his throat in a gesture of defiance to relatives of the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.

Former Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic attends his trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia at The Hague on Wednesday. (POOL)

Wed., May 16, 2012

THE HAGUE, NETHERLANDS—Twenty years after his troops began brutally ethnically cleansing Bosnian towns and villages of non-Serbs, Gen. Ratko Mladic went on trial Wednesday at the Yugoslav war crimes tribunal accused of 11 counts of genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The ailing 70-year-old Mladic’s appearance at the UN court war crimes tribunal marked the end of a long wait for justice to survivors of the 1992-95 war that left some 100,000 people dead. The trial is also a landmark for the UN court and international justice — Mladic is the last suspect from the Bosnian war to go on trial here.

Mladic taunted Srebrenica survivors on Wednesday at the start of his trial, running his hand across his throat in a gesture of defiance to relatives of the worst massacre in Europe since World War II.

Mladic flashed a thumbs-up and clapped his hands as he entered the courtroom in The Hague, where he faces possible life imprisonment.

In the packed public seating area, a mother of one of the Srebrenica victims whispered “vulture” several times as prosecutors opened their case.

Later, Mladic made eye contact with one of the Muslim women in the audience, running a hand across his throat, in a gesture that led Presiding judge Alphons Orie to hold a brief recess and order an end to “inappropriate interactions.”

Wearing a dark suit and tie, he sat, eyeglasses in hand, listening intently and jotting notes as prosecutors made their opening remarks.

Prosecutor Dermot Groome said Mladic and other Bosnian Serbs had divided the territory of the former Yugoslavia along ethnic lines and implemented a common plan to exterminate non-Serbs.

“The prosecution will present evidence that will show beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr. Mladic in each of these crimes,” he said.

Mladic was in charge of the Bosnian Serb army when, over several days in July 1995, Serb fighters overran the Srebrenica enclave in eastern Bosnia, theoretically under the protection of Dutch UN peacekeepers.

Video footage shot at the time showed Mladic mingling with Muslim prisoners. Shortly afterwards, the men and boys were separated from the women, stripped of identification, and shot.

The dead were bulldozed into mass graves, then later dug up with excavators and hauled away in trucks to be better hidden from the world, in dozens of remote mass graves.

Prosecutors say Mladic was part of a “joint criminal enterprise to eliminate the Bosnian Muslims in Srebrenica by killing the men and boys ... and forcibly removing the women, young children and some elderly men”.

Mladic is also held responsible for the siege and bombardment of the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, which prosecutors said was intended to “spread terror among the civilian population”.

The horrors of the siege, together with the Srebrenica massacre, eventually galvanized world opinion in support of the campaign of Western air strikes on Bosnian Serb targets that brought the conflict to an end shortly after.

Mladic was indicted in 1995 along with Radovan Karadzic, the Bosnian Serbs' political leader.

Yet both remained free in Serbia for more than a decade before being tracked down and sent to The Hague. Karadzic's trial is already under way.

Defence lawyers say they have not had have enough time to review the huge case file prepared by prosecutors and asked for the trial to be postponed, but the request was denied.

Serge Brammertz, the court's chief prosecutor, has dismissed Mladic's assertion that he is too frail to sit through a 200-hour prosecution case involving testimony from 411 witnesses.

His appearance in The Hague is testament to the work of the tribunal, which has defied sceptics by managing, in the course of 19 years, to arrest all its 161 indictees.

But some victims still fear that Mladic, who has received physical therapy for a possible stroke, could escape judgment by dying in mid-trial.

Mladic's mentor, former Serbian president Slobodan Milosevic, the architect of the Balkan wars, died in detention in 2006, a few months before a verdict in his trial for genocide and other war crimes in Croatia, Bosnia and Kosovo.

Munira Subasic, who lost 22 family members in the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, was among a group of relatives of war dead in the courtroom’s public gallery to face Mladic.

The 65-year-old said she wanted to look him in the eye “and ask him if he will repent for what he did.”

Presiding Judge Alphons Orie of the Netherlands said at the outset that the court was considering postponing the presentation of evidence, due to start May 29, due to “errors” by prosecutors in disclosing evidence to the defence. Prosecutor Dermot Groome said he would not oppose a “reasonable adjournment.”

Groome began his opening statement by focusing on the plight of a 14-year-old boy whose father and uncle were among 150 men murdered by Bosnian Serb forces in November 1992, part of a pattern of atrocities that characterized the start of the war.

“The world watched in disbelief that in neighbourhoods and villages within Europe a genocide appeared to be in progress,” he said.

Groome said Mladic’s forces continued such killings through to 1995, when they massacred some 8,000 Muslim men in the Srebrenica enclave.

“By the time Mladic and his troops murdered thousands in Srebrenica ... they were well-rehearsed in the craft of murder,” Groome told the court.

He then showed judges video of the aftermath of a notorious shelling of a market in Markale, in the Bosnian capital Sarajevo, that killed dozens of people.

He said all the attacks were part of an “overarching” plan to ethnically cleanse parts of Bosnia of non-Serbs.

Prosecutors will present evidence, including Mladic’s own wartime diaries, which demonstrate, “beyond reasonable doubt the hand of Mr. Mladic in each of these crimes,” Groome said.

Mladic has refused to enter pleas, but he denies wrongdoing, saying he acted to defend Serbs in Bosnia.

Mladic’s trial opened as the case against his former political master, Radovan Karadzic, has reached its halfway stage at the same court. Both men face virtually identical 11-count indictments alleging they masterminded the ethnic cleansing of Bosnia. The man accused of fomenting conflicts throughout the Balkans in the 1990s, former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, died in his cell here in The Hague in 2006 before judges could deliver verdicts in his trial.

Karadzic and Mladic were indicted together 17 years ago, but their cases were split when Karadzic was captured in Serbia in 2008 and transferred to The Hague. It was another three years before Mladic was finally arrested in a village near Belgrade, ending 15 years as one of the world’s most-wanted fugitives.

Izudin Alic, a Muslim boy made famous in 1995 by images of Mladic patting his face and handing him chocolate, said he wants swift justice after waiting for so long. He planned to watch the opening of the trial on television.

“Just like everyone else, I want him to be tried and sentenced as fast as possible. I hope that the trial will not drag on,” he said as he visited his father’s grave in Potocari, near Srebrenica. “I want him to be sentenced as soon as possible.”

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